Shelby Steele Quotes

You cannot talk about race without talking about privilege. And when people start talking about privilege, they get paralyzed by shame.

If you're black in America, race is a factor in your life. Start with that assumption.

When we understand [that] American democracy and white supremacy are inextricably linked, we can see how tortuous our efforts have been to accommodate the value gap.

If blacks are oppressed in America, why isn't there a black exodus?

Ours has not been a racially democratic society for 300 years.

If you are attempting to study American history, and you don't understand the force of white supremacy, you fundamentally misunderstand America.

So many white people don't want to talk about race; it's uncomfortable. Many reason that slavery happened more than a century ago, and people alive today had nothing to do with it. But the particulars of these stories, from slavery to segregation to civil rights and mass incarceration, are at the marrow of life in America today.

There is - and always will be - the legacy of chattel slavery in this nation, an obsession with racial and gender differences, but I think that, at its best, this nation is capable of creating standards for itself and reaching towards those standards.

We question these issues of race and struggle and white privilege because we know that those issues are real and because those issues have real implications in black communities. And white supremacy is not only dangerous, but it is deadly.

No one who's white thinks he's innocent. No one who's black thinks he's guilty.

However, while we should certainly celebrate the demise of overt official racism, we must also critically examine where we are at this historical moment, recognize the many challenges ahead and reaffirm our commitment to making Brown v. Board a reality.

There's only one free person in this society, and he is white and male.

The black community sees itself as one group, and they are all experiencing the same experiences as a group with racism and whatnot, growing up in this country.

We have defeated Jim Crow, but now we have to deal with his son, James Crow Jr., esquire.

Black America surely faces an existential crisis, but not the one imagined in the condescending news media - of somehow getting non-black America to be more just and generous. The truth is, we've already been through that, and there is nothing left to do. We're out of 'affirmative actions' of all kinds.

White America is tortured by black America's failure to thrive, and all that guilt and anxiety has only gotten worse as a substantial quota of white America loses its own footing in the middle class and plunges into the rough country of joblessness, hopelessness, and government dependency.

In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination - and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past - are real and must be addressed.

All white people in the United States have benefited from a white supremacy. But does that mean that a white person should be viewed badly because they turn against a white supremacist policy? Just because you've benefited from something shouldn't disable you from repudiating it.

There is nothing of any consequence in education, in the economy, in city planning, in social policy that does not concern black people.

The American imagination has never been able to fully recover from its white-supremacist beginnings.

There is no more apartheid in South Africa than in the United States.

Education in this country is about how to maintain the status quo and to perpetuate racism.

By the 1960s, many of us believed that the Civil Rights Movement could eliminate racism in America during our lifetime. But despite significant progress, racism remains.

I definitely think the fact that I come from a multicultural background, my mother living life in a white skin and having white skin privilege from the time I was little, I was aware of that.

I had always been interested in race and racial justice, but mostly it was with my nose pressed up against the glass, looking at the South from a long way away.